I like the noises the enemies make

the game also starts out good, not trying to tutorialize too much, and making it challenging by default but not too much

i like the tension of being low-key worried about getting lost when trying to explore a new area, weighing the reward of what you might find vs the risk of losing your marbles in a place that's difficult to get back to

but what if you find a bench? oohhhh


rant
Something I noticed early, which is maybe a specific thing relevant to metroidvania games in general, is how they thought about the way that a basic move can be exploited. For example, bouncing on top of an enemy witch your jump attack. Something that happens in a lot of metroidvanias I played, is that they designed the 'unreachable' areas without fully understanding how they might in fact be reachable by exploiting some other mechanic. Which leads to you finding things out of order and breaking the progression. I don't want to throw shade so I'm not going to name games.

But silksong kinda expects you to explore the limits of your abilities right away, by throwing in some areas that you don't have to explore, so the player has some opportunity to discover. You wouldn't be stuck, but you would be wondering if maybe you could have gotten there somehow. Until finally you WILL reach an area where you HAVE to know what to do

BEWARE. A game breaking bug that affected many people, has not been fixed since 2023. They have not even responded to it.

When a boss is killed, any remaining projectile can kill you before the cutscene triggers. If that happens your save is broken. You won't be able to progress and there is NOTHING you can do about it.

I thought 'let me finish the last route real quick and be done with this' ... I started at 1:30 am and it's now 7pm ... I think I broke a record.

I will post the review later

I binged through the first 5 Trails games and that was one of the best gaming experiences in terms of immersion. Starting Cold Steel 1 was like hitting a wall. Contrived school setting, even less voice acting, jarring 3d graphics replacing the detailed portraits. A bloated cast that impressively keeps bloating, not once getting pruned throughout the series.

I took almost a year off, unintended, just couldn't stomach it. Though I still love it, I was so ready to say goodbye to this whole cast. It ended up feeling like a lot of unused potential in an attempt to give everyone equal coverage. Anyway, I can't complain, I knew what it was. I think 4 games was really way too long. Did people really love Rean that much? Then again, I would have gotten tired of ANY character across that much time.

The overall grand scale conflicts were interesting, but much too drawn out. And ultimately nothing really plays out, it keeps sort of circling back to the beginning, where nobody really faces any consequences beyond "sorry about that, I actually had good intentions all along, I see clearly now"

I think in some way this has always been a Trails thing, and maybe my negative disposition towards Cold Steel caused me to see the problem with it. And after that much repetition of the same hooks and gimmicks, I suppose it was bound to wear off at some point

But I can't complain, or well, I haven't complained. I consumed it all and it was too much. Sunk cost fallacy, and not wanting to skip over anything. I can't complain.......